In September 2001 I was on a photo shoot in New York, and on the night of the tenth I celebrated my birthday. I was awoken the following morning at about nine o’clock by the screaming outside. Looking out the window I saw people and cars pouring through the street in an apparent state of shock and panic all going in the same direction, uptown. Every channel on television was covering the incredible news of planes hitting the World Trade Center and the Pentagon almost simultaneously. Soon the first terrible images were being broadcast as the media began getting footage of the attacks. Grabbing my camera and bag of film I headed downtown on foot; there was no other means of transportation. It took an hour to get there, and besides the emergency vehicles, ambulances, fire engines and police I seemed to be the only person going that way. Nobody seemed to know what was happening, but everyone was talking about war, and great plumes of smoke were visible above the skyscrapers.

When I took up photography professionally I had in the forefront of my mind a career in photojournalism inspired by Vietnam photos by the likes of Don McCullum. I had even been talking to UNICEF in Geneva about photo shoots in Central Africa. Before 9/11 my image of soldiers and emergency workers was one gleaned from television news shows where heroism, patriotism and professionalism shown in their eyes. But that day there was more in the eyes of the workers I saw: a terrible shock, and the same scream for help that was in the eyes of everyone else. Nobody knew if there was more to come, nobody knew exactly what had happened, only that hundreds if not thousands of people were dead or injured. Chaos was everywhere, along with shock and desperation.

As I ran downtown I saw huge clouds of smoke billowing towards me. About ten blocks from the World Trade Center police barriers were already in place. I told them I was from the Russian press and they let me through; I had a big camera and must have seemed authentic. Closer there were more barriers, and here I was stopped and turned away upon being unable to produce press credentials. I found a parking garage four blocks away and managed to access the roof from where I shot a few pictures through a haze of smoke, ash and dust. Downstairs in a builders’ hut I found a mask. Suddenly I was thirty feet away at the absolute bottom of the World Trade Center surrounded by exhausted firemen, police and F.B.I. agents. Strangely I felt no fear. All I knew was that I had to record as much of this as possible, that this was a day that would live in infamy forever. But I stayed out of the way of the rescuers. I had such admiration for their bravery. All this was before the buildings collapsed, and I’m sure many of the people I was photographing were later killed.

It was a hot day. The sun was shining through this huge cloud of smoke and ash, and it was almost impossible to breathe. Layers of paper, documents and glass were everywhere and continued to rain down. I stayed there until 10 p.m., until it was too dark to shoot and I was out of film. I was exhausted. There wasn’t a mobile that worked so I could not communicate with my family in Prague and they could not get in touch with me. Talking to my mother late at night I realized that putting oneself deliberately in harm’s way would have a devastating effect on one’s family.

The whole of the following week was even worse. The buildings collapsed and thousands of lives were lost. The T.V. coverage was non-stop with images of the planes actually crashing into the top floors of the towers being repeated endlessly, the roll-call of the dead, the desperate people looking for their loved ones, and everyone confused, scared, and angry, talking about more attacks, or all out war. Everywhere there were alarms and evacuations, police and the military. That week was the longest week in my life. I was desperate to go home, to get away from New York City, to flee this terrible devastation, but there were no planes. You can only hold yourself together for so long, and as soon as I arrived back in London I could not stop crying and shaking.

That was the week I realized I could not pursue a career in photojournalism, that it takes a particular kind of psyche to record events of chaos, death and devastation without damaging the soul. I simply do not have the strength.

These photographs are my record of the events and the images of that day in September 2001, a day the world will never forget.

Lucie Pavlovich